Sunday, May 6, 2007

The LA Times is a big fat paper, about which someone once joked that "It seems to be edited with a shovel." True but the good stuff is very good. The Food Section on Wednesday is wonderful and the revived West Magazine is not as good as it once was but its better than an airline magazine.

Richard "Mack" Machowicz speaks softly and carries a big laser-guided, over-the-horizon, armor-penetrating stick. Machowicz is the host of Discovery Channel's "Future Weapons," a breathless hour of gun love in which Mack—former Navy SEAL and a keen advocate of peace through superior firepower—pulls the trigger on some of the most fearsome hardware ever procured by the Pentagon.

In one episode, he ventilates the night with the fire-spitting 40mm cannon aboard an AC-130 Spectre gunship. On another, Mack visits with the men behind the Massive Ordinance Air Blast device (MOAB), a 21,000-pound, mushroom-cloud-forming super-bomb that is the largest conventional weapon in the Air Force arsenal, thus earning it the nickname Mother Of All Bombs.

It was the MOAB segment that stayed my remote-control hand. While I'm no authority on the laws of armed conflict, it seemed to me a weapon with a lethal blast radius of 400 feet is a tad, well, indiscriminate. Perhaps glorifying this pseudo-nuke was in some sense ethically dubious.

"You can't put it down to the weapon," says Machowicz when I reached him by phone. "Any weapon is unethical if used improperly." The MOAB was designed primarily as a psychological weapon, Machowicz says. Also, the MOAB provides an alternative to battlefield nukes. "Not a good alternative, but an alternative," he says. The show—promoted as part of what Discovery calls its "Manday" lineup on Mondays—typically has four segments, each featuring a high-tech weapon system and each, ideally, ending in an incandescent gout of destruction that makes you ever so glad you're not a jihadist in Warizistan. A season-one segment featured the world's most powerful cluster bomb. Misplace your Jane's Defense Weekly? That's the CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW), which can rain down molten copper over 600,000 square feet. Another segment explored ground-penetrating thermobaric weapons, which are an extremely unpleasant variety of incinerating fuel-air explosive that can be used to—if I may paraphrase President Bush—smoke them out of their holes.

Who is "they"? Well, who have you got?

"The world is full of bad people, evil people," said Machowicz. "People who are fundamentally inconsiderate of their actions." Ah, teenagers.

Cable TV has always had more than a whiff of cordite. Following Clausewitz's maxim that all history is, at base, military history, the History Channel offers a steady diet of armed conflict: "Dogfights of the Middle East," "Man Moment Machine: Patton and the Desperate Tank Attack," are a couple of current titles. In a charming confluence of life and art, R. Lee Ermey—a former Marine drill instructor cast as the martinet in "Full Metal Jacket"—hosts his own show of weapons past, present and future, called "Mail Call." If that's not enough gear, guns and guts for you, flip to the Military Channel. They're always storming the beaches of Normandy and Tarawa over there.

God knows I love to see things blow up. A proper gentleman's education cannot be considered complete unless he has, at some point, shot a watermelon with a high-powered rifle. But I have a major problem with a lot of this programming, the first being its clinical and morally vacant fascination in killing. You know that familiar wing-camera footage of white-orange napalm blooming in the jungle canopy in Vietnam? There are people under there. At the other end of every smart bomb is some poor dumb bastard who is about to be blown to bits. When I hear some narrator crow about America's precision bombing, I just cringe. There is nothing precise about a 1,000-pound bomb.

I had a similar reaction to media coverage of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge, DARPA's annual open competition for auto- nomous ground vehicles. How many people registered that this was a program to develop robotic weapons? Did anybody even see "The Terminator"?

It's not about the necessity of armed conflict, or morality of a particular weapon. All of that is, as they say in the military, above my pay grade. It's about making glib entertainment out of mechanized death. You couldn't blame a visitor from another country watching this program and concluding that Americans have slipped into a nutty late-Roman fascism.

Mack disagrees. The effect of this technology is, he says, to make warfare less destructive, to limit collateral damage, to protect our own forces, and in some cases—such as the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a focused sound weapon—to find non-lethal means to achieve military objectives. "It's about how much responsibility you are trying to take for the battlefield."

A whisper-voiced bulldog of a man with a head as smooth as an ROTC drill team helmet, Mack seems like a decent sort of guy. I pressed him as to whether he thought perhaps his show is just a televised front porch for the military-industrial complex. He does, after all, have some amazing access, and he never seems to have met a gold-plated weapons system he doesn't like.

Good propaganda fools the people who see it. Great propaganda fools the people who make it.